Photo Editors Are Often The Least Appreciated Part Of The Journalistic Process

As I’m sure you’ve read or heard recently, photographers and journalists at the Olympics are publishing photos 120 seconds after being shot.

This is an absolutely incredible feat that requires the constant communication and organization of a team of editors and shooters as well as an infrastructure to keep data flowing. This is just a side effect of the relentless demand that online news sources have for visual media. What this breeds is a sort of McDonalds-like mentality regarding speed over quality.

Allen Murabayashi at PetaPixel wrote an incredibly important article about a symptom of this thirst for content: The lack of photo editors, and further, the idea that photo editors aren’t necessary.

I myself am not a photojournalist, and there are a lot of reasons why I wouldn’t call myself one. I tell stories in a different way and at a different pace than a photo-journalist. I feel that it’s incredibly important as a creative to know what your place is, and if you’re forced to do multiple jobs, having the self-awareness to actively put on and take off different hats. And that’s not easy.

To accept that a photo editor’s job is different from a photo-journalist is to accept that you’re going to add quite a bit of time and perhaps a decent amount of money to your workflow. But as Murabayashi explains, having this professional perspective is vitally important to the success of each image. The sad thing is that I don’t see this trend changing in the near future.

Selection of an obscure photo that does little to inform the viewer (i.e. handball image)

…Photo editing can seem like a very abstract skill, and perhaps one that doesn’t require much effort or experience. But the ability to cull images from tens of thousands to ten, sequence them to create a flow, and tell a story isn’t something that just happens. In the case of something like sports, a good photo editor will have seen millions of images from a given sport to understand what images are accurately portraying the sport while avoiding stereotypical shots.

Note: it is our policy to give credit as well as deserved traffic to our news sources – so we don't repost the entire article – sorry, I know you want the juicy bits, but I feel it is only fair that their site get the traffic and besides, you just might make a new friend and find an advertiser that has something you've never seen before

Bret Hoy is a filmmaker, photographer and writer based out of St. Louis, Missouri. Mainly focused on documentary and experimental film, he has produced, directed, shot and edited many short films and a few long form works.